S6 | Episode 6 | Rona Ruthen, Angel Investor, Advisor & Former VP Of Customer Operations At Monzo: Scaling Operations For A Hyper-Growth Start-Up

  Hello, and welcome to a new episode of the Startup Diaries brought to you by Burns Sheehan, the leading technology recruitment business here in the UK.  In today's episode, we have Rona Ruthen, who is the former VP of customer operations at Monzo. In this episode, Rona talks us through a time at Monzo, how she scaled the customer operations team from around 400 up to around 2, 400 people.

She actually then dives into one of the more difficult times in her career, where she had to shut down an entire office in Las Vegas for Monzo and made match redundancies. How this actually affected her and the team that was remaining. She then dives into what it looks like to be a good operational leader and what challenges she sees throughout our operational teams.

Finally, she talks us through the next stage in her career as an angel investor, working alongside Ventures Together. It's a great episode. We hope you enjoy it.  Welcome Rana. Thanks for joining us.  Thanks so much for having me. Do you want to start off by telling us a bit about.  I guess your career journey to date.

Yeah, of course. So well, I've been working in startups and scale ups, scale ups for the past 16 years or so. Mostly focused on fintech payments operations. And as you said, up until a year ago, I was VP of customer operations at Monzo Bank. I was very lucky to have gone through sort of building and scaling customer operations through hyper growth.

So it was a crazy, exciting journey from a million customers to six million from, you know, 400 people to 2300 people in the company to a wonderful 5 billion. So super, super lucky to have gone through that. I'm also a non exec director and I advise a few startups and scale ups. And a few months ago I joined Ventures Together as a partner.

Ventures Together, or VT as we call it, is a community of founders and operators who angel invest and help companies together. And so in our members, we're responsible for building some of the biggest startups that we all know. Wise, Klarna,  And we're building ventures together because we believe founders are significantly more successful when they build their companies with experienced operators.

And that the best way to cultivate these relationships and these connections is through angel investing.  How did you get involved with ventures together? Was it through the Monzo link or is it through your network? How did that come about?  So it was still, I was still at Monzo at the time. And I was starting to think about angel investments.

But I didn't have much capital available nor did I have the access to great deals. And I didn't actually know much about how to do it. And so it was at a point in time where I would say I was thinking about it, but not quite doing anything active. And then a friend introduced me to Tom Savage and Rob O'Donovan, who founded Ventures Together in a perfect timing situation it was the early days of VT and I joined as a member of the community there were about 50 of us at the time and it was just The exact type of learning opportunity that I wanted and needed.

It was a wonderful community to be a part of and to learn from. It gave me access to great deals the ability to learn how to source my own deals and how to make decisions about angel investment. It was just a great A great experience as a member of the community.  And then over time, I probably made about 15 investments in the sort of first year while I was still figuring out what I'm interested in and how much I want to invest and how I do this.

And Tom, Rob and I started talking about how they plan to grow VT in the community and and what they, what kind of roles they might have in mind in terms of growing the team. And actually it took us a bit of time, but at some point all the stars aligned. And and a few months ago I joined them as a partner, which I'm very excited about.

Awesome. I just, how's it, what's it like being on the other side of the fence then looking at the investment piece? How's that been for you? Well, I think I'm kind of on the fence because I'm very much I'm very much an operator and we don't make investment decisions per se. So it's actually the community members that make their own decisions about investing.

And so for us building ventures together and growing the community, it's actually more about getting access to deals, bringing the right community members who are great founders and operators and building it, the whole machine that works behind the scenes to make all of this happen. So I'm still very much an operator and we're a tiny company, we're four people, so it's very much a startup in itself.

And But it does give me a new lens into how investments work, how, how do deals close, and how the relationships happen behind the scenes in terms of who invests in what, and how do you get people involved. And it's great loving it. Good, good, good. Well, obviously, We've got you on the podcast. I have to dive into the Monzo experience in particular, and one of the things we're trying to improve here in the podcast, actually more tangible outcomes within certain spheres within business.

A lot of what we cover is a lot of technology focus, but having you on as the VP of operations at Monzo, I'd love you to kind of talk us through the relationship that you had there between operations and tech within the business.  Yeah. So that's always an interesting question. I think for me, when I joined Monzo there were already a couple of product and engineering squads within operations.

And for me, it was a new kind of heaven. In previous roles in companies, I've always had to fight to get any allocation of resources of engineering of the right kind of support to be able to build systems and processes in the right way. And so Monzo was very much already committed to. High quality customer service and operations and doing that through a tech and data led approach.

So that was amazing. And then the challenge is that through hyper growth and in most companies, it's all about how do how you prioritize what you do and it's how do you find the balance between growth and revenue and cutting costs and maintaining high quality customer experience while the customer base is growing by 100, 000 customers every month, and it's just a It's all a huge mix and everyone in the company is fighting to get more engineering time, more data people, more product people, because we're all building and we're all trying to do what's right for customers.

So it's not so much a tension in the sense that we disagree on what we want to do, it's more how do we decide what's more important than anything else. And that's mostly a healthy tension. We actually had a very good relationship between tech and operations. The other complexity of this is that when you're.

When you, when you're growing, when you're, when you're bigger and you're launching new custom, new features and new products to what is now hundreds of thousands of customers and even millions of customers, the sensitivity and complexity of getting it wrong is, is much more, more critical for you as a company and the impact it could have on customers in their lives when we're talking about their money.

And so we ended up establishing a team called Which were operations people customer operations people who were embedded in product squads across the company and actually provided that two way bridge sort of helping everyone in customer operations being really well prepared for any changes or any launches of products across the company.

And equally providing the products was with insight as to what wasn't working well for customers, what's getting customers to get in touch with us, how we could improve their experience and that bridge is it just it just grew from a team of three people to 30 people and it's a big significant part of making sure that that's a great relationship.

Yeah, well, you obviously touched upon scaling there. You were part of Monzo when they had less than 400 people. I think you mentioned when you were leaving, it was around 2, 400. So, you know, just an extra 2, 000 people on top. Can you tell us a bit about what it was like from an operational point of view?

Perspective for that scale. Yeah, well, it definitely wasn't boring. Yeah,  I would say that the number of people  is actually a reflection of the growth in customers and complexity because you have more people in the company because you have way more customers than you did before. You have more features, more products.

More customer segments, and so everything you do becomes more complex. There's just more nuance and variations of everything. And so within operations processes that once actually catered for thousands of customers now need to take care of or need to serve millions of customers. And you have different types of customers and you have different levels of sensitivity and you have lots of different teams internally that you have to make sure have the right tools and systems.

And essentially that means when you're growing really quickly, that Everything that worked well six months ago is probably going to break now or sometime soon.  And  And it also means that it's much harder to deliver a high quality work with operations, customer support with the level of consistency that you want to provide to your customers.

And so it's a lot about just being okay with change and accepting that you're essentially working at a different company every six months.  That's right. One thing I'd love to touch upon, and it's probably a great question that I'll probably have to take notes on myself, but your team's obviously scaled in that time.

So  how do you scale yourself? Personally, as you know, as a, as a leader with the speed of what's going on around you and I guess the, the, the quantity as well, that's going on around you.  Yeah, I mean, my journey before Monzo, I led a team of 20 people, which I was super, super proud of. And then when I joined Monzo I led a team of 250 people and then moved on to lead all of customer operations, which was it was about 800 people at the time.

And then by the time I left, this was over 1200 people , so.  Quite scary numbers. I still, when I see how people react to the numbers, when I say them out loud, I still don't know how I actually decided that that was a good idea for me. But the question about how to scale yourself is a really great question.

And I'm not sure I have a great answer, but I'll give it a try. First of all, it's hard work. So, and, and I think in a high growth journey like that, you're almost always a couple of steps behind where you wish you would be in terms of how you're operating and the level of the level that you're operating in.

I think from my perspective I read a lot of articles and books about management and, and about leadership. I talk to friends and colleagues who are doing similar roles at different levels. I work with a coach which has been career. defining, and I would strongly recommend that. And so I really invest in what I need to learn and to understand to be able to scale my, myself.

A lot of this, when, when you're growing super quickly includes how, what to be in control of and how, and what to let go of. So for example, when moving when moving to Monza from a smaller company, I moved from a situation where I felt I knew how, Everything that was going on in the company and how everything works, and I was in control of everything, and then I moved to Monza, which was already significantly bigger, and the first thing I had to learn was like, I am never going to be able to be involved in everything.

And that's, that's a difficult one. And then equally, you get to the point where you're, a more senior leader and you're managing a team of 1, 200 people and you need to find a way to be in control of what's happening across multiple teams, multiple processes, multiple products and projects. Sorry. And there are there are very different ways of doing that.

So I would say there's, it's a lot of hard work, a lot of reflection. And actually one, one little point that I would add, one of the most effective tools that I found for myself Is actually writing down reflections. And so when I have challenges and a lot of the challenges that you encounter are actually quite emotional and relationship driven at work.

And so actually writing down how I feel, what my triggers are, what I would have done differently in hindsight, what I might still want to go back and fix with  people or processes has been an incredible tool that I still use at work and in life.  Obviously you referenced the kind of book side of things.

Are there any that stand out for you that were particularly powerful in that,  that journey that sort of kicked you on? Quite a few. One of my favourites is the five dysfunctions of a team.  It's a great book, and it really emphasizes the importance of trust in building teams and forming teams and in, in how you present yourself in, in those situations.

So I would strongly recommend that. Radical Candor. He's also a favourite. I don't like the title,  but, but I think the book is excellent. And very, very useful, especially for people who are sort of going into or growing into leadership roles. There's the culture club and then there's a few books that are also about customer support and operations like, um, sorry, we should probably edit this.

The delivering happiness.  Delivering happiness, which is a great book about the, about Zappos which was for me a super useful way to think about customer, customer support, but also to really identify the difference between delivering customer support when it's about selling shoes versus when you're building a bank which is really different.

And actually one of my favourite books is shoe dog. Which is yeah, you know that.  Lots of people love it. And Phil Knight, founder of Nike, and, and it's just a great story with really deep, thoughtful reflections on the journey. And from, I don't know a young guy with a few shoes in the garage to, well, what, what we know today.

Yeah, yeah, I recommend that one as well. I've heard that one recently. Actually, that's why it's sort of triggered that initial response straight away. It's just, I'd love to then actually dive into your thoughts about what you think makes a good operational leader.  Oh,  well, I think  probably a lot of what I'm going to say is not.

Is true for any leader, not just operational leader. And I think probably the most important thing is a growth mindset. I'm gonna like this is going to include a bunch of cliches, but some cliches are true. So we're going to use that. But basically, you have to constantly be learning. You have to constantly evaluate how well you're doing making sure that you're self aware enough to understand what you're not doing well, making sure you're getting the right level of feedback from people around you and that you're learning from it.

So I would include in that understanding key parts of your personality, of your biases, your blind spots so a lot of self awareness and then In operations, but in most roles, it's also about anticipating what could go wrong. What's the worst case scenario? Are we ready for it? In operations, I would also add that it's about what could go right.

And are we ready for it? Because sometimes when things go exceptionally well as, as a company, that's actually a huge challenge from an operational perspective. It's about knowing that things are going to not going, not going to go according to plan, and keeping your cool, handling incidents and challenges in the right way.

And ultimately for all leaders, it's about taking care of your team while also prioritizing what's right for customers and for the company and how to maintain that balance and communicate it.  That was a long list. That's a good list. We'll take it. No, I appreciate that. I think from your point of view then, are there any common challenges that you've seen across operational teams then that reoccur no matter the business or does it depend on, you know, size, scale, et cetera?

No, there are quite a few common ones. I mean, some of them we touched on, which is just the general challenge of prioritization, which is true for any business and any team, but specifically operations. Tend to be deprioritized in, in quite a lot of businesses. And so the challenge of how to bring that up to the right level of importance and focus is actually one of the things that I would say most operational team deal with, and that requires quite a bit of internal education, not all founders or CEOs necessarily know.

What actually is operations, the complexity of it and what it takes to do it well, and especially as you're growing and the company is changing. And so I think I would say that is a key challenge for operational team. How do you  go through the internal education? journey and how do you get some of your projects prioritized in an environment that actually deprioritizes operations.

And mostly how do you prepare for all the things that are going to go wrong and go unexpectedly. Yeah. Perfect.  Can I jump in with a couple of questions about Ventures Together for you then? I'd just love to know, obviously, you're part of the podcast today. When you're, you know, you talk about sort of finding your own leads or, you know, reviewing businesses and having a look at it.

Now you're on this side of, on the fence, as you called it what are you looking for? What really, you know, there's people here who are business, who are listening, are business owners. How, how, how do they kind of.  You know, get you excited or potential investors at VT excited about their business. What are you looking for?

Well, we probably look for what most early stage investors look for a strong founding team people who are very passionate about what they're doing and have a good fit for the market that they're trying to address. We like to see that it's as, as anyone else, that it's a big enough market and there's a hundred X opportunity in it.

I personally like businesses that are trying to do something good. And there's lots of variations for what good looks like. And I think it's also important to say that within the members of ventures together, there's quite a wide range in terms of what their personal thesis is and how they prioritize what they invest in.

But generally when we look at teams, we, we, I would say. It's mostly about the founders somewhat about the markets and somewhat about the direction of the product that they're building.  You see more businesses coming through now that are looking to do good as such as their tech for good businesses.

Are they on the rise?  It's a great question. I know it's  hard for me to say on a market level. What I would say is that I think the more we have a wide range of people who are going into angel investments, I think there's a bigger group of people who prioritize  making investments based on doing goods, impact diversity in the teams that they're investing in.

And so that's a positive impact on the ecosystem altogether. And actually part of what we're trying to encourage through Ventures Together, we want more people to go into angel investing, people who have the right experience to be able to support the companies that they're investing in.  Okay, that's great.

Well, thanks for that. I know through that you kind of left field there, so apologies for that.  The last two questions that we, we dive into on the podcast are obviously bookend are really just key ones for us. So what's been the biggest challenge for you in your career to date? I've got two answers to this.

The first is about the hardest thing I had to do. And that was while I was at Monzo, we decided to close down our office in Vegas. That was in the, in the early days of COVID. And so we essentially let go of 160 people over Hangout and closed down the office.  It was the hardest thing I had to do, both in terms of making the decision, going through the process of getting it approved with the right people within Monzo and all the way up to the board going through the process of how do we build the right package for them, build the right plan for communication so that we do it in the most humane and the best possible way and what is a horrible situation for the people that we are letting go.

And it was the other challenge around this is how do you keep it quite confidential until the point where you let people know. In the right way at the right time, which also meant that we had to keep it. Keep it a secret from our most immediate teams before we actually announced it to the team that was being impacted.

And it was very, very challenging. And there was a lot of  feedback internally about the decision and about how we exercise it. I am.  I'm actually very proud of how we handled it. It was, it's a horrible decision to make, and I wish we didn't have to, but it was the right decision for the business. And I am very proud of how we handled it in terms of the package we put together, the, the communication level, we provided a lot of support for the people who left in terms of writing their CVs, even finding new jobs and connecting them to other employees in the US, but it was still the hardest thing I had to do.

So that's one side of the challenges in my career to date. And I guess the other thing is what we discussed earlier is how to scale yourself when everything around you is changing and scaling super quickly. It's an exciting challenge and one that I'm still enjoying, but I think that's, it's always being on a sort of uphill curve basically.

And, and how do you get comfortable with never being at a point where you're like, Oh, cool. Okay. I like, I'm in control. I know how it works. And I think when you're in high growth companies, you get there from time to time and you have these five minutes where you're like, okay, I'm cool. I know what I'm doing.

And then probably five minutes later, that's like. It's a whole other world again. Whole five minutes of accomplishment and realizing then you've that five minute of joy is probably already passed you by and the company's changed already. Brilliant. I have to dive in and just ask a bit about the redundancy aspects.

We're obviously seeing it in the market a lot more this year. You're hearing about it in the news. What do you see as the cultural impacts of those redundancies upon the business?  Yeah, we actually  also went through a redundancy round within Monzo in addition to the Vegas office. It was, it wasn't a huge round of redundancies and it was through COVID, but it was also a very painful experience.

I think in terms of the cultural impacts,  we spend a lot of time thinking and talking about the people we are letting go of, as we should, and as I mentioned, we talk about communication and the package and how do we help people through the process when they leave, and that's super, super important, but I think there's a huge impact on those who stay, and we don't always, companies don't always know to anticipate and anticipate.

How to deal with that. And don't always spend as much time preparing for that impact. And what this means is that the people who are left behind and are saying goodbye to people that they trust and they love they have more fear than they've than they had before about their own job security and especially if you're quite early stage in your career.

Maybe this is the first time that you've ever been in this situation and you don't, you know, Actually know that this unfortunately happens from time to time, and they're also worried about or have uncertainty around their own workload. If a bunch of people leave, then what does that mean for your own role and for what you have to do for the company?

And so there's a lot of uncertainty and fear and sadness for the people who are left behind in the company. And that has or can have a very significant cultural impact on the people who are staying, staying behind. And again, I think it's it's, it impacts everyone. It's much harder when you're early in your career and you've never seen this before.

It's very hard to do this well. And especially if you think of redundancies as a process that usually impacts multiple levels of a company, then it's you also have managers and managers of managers who are impacted by this directly and indirectly. And so even for them to perform very well and make sure the process is handled very well is also a challenge.

And I would mostly say that it takes quite a bit of time for companies to heal and to recover after a round of redundancies, and that shouldn't be underestimated. So there should be a lot of focus from management  on what happens after the day of, basically, how do you  Enable a certain sense of security in in the state of the company in people's roles in the in the management of the workload.

How do you allow time to have conversations about what happened? And just slowly get to the point where you get re excited about what's happening in the company. And I've had lots of conversations about this. I mean, obviously, we went through a little bit of this at Monzo, but also lots of colleagues who have gone through this with their companies.

Definitely through COVID. And obviously now we're hearing about it a lot. And I think focusing on what happens the day after you finish the redundancy process is as important as managing the process itself. Yeah. No, thanks for your honesty on that one. It's not something we've ever had a chance to discuss on, on the pod before.

So I thought I'd jump in and ask a final question from us then. What one piece of advice would you give to someone who's thinking about joining a startup?  I'm going to use another cliche change is the only constant in startups. It's cliche because it's true. But mostly I think  we like, we, I mean, the wider industry of startups and tech like to sell the idea of moving fast, ambiguity, you'll get to do different things.

You'll grow with a role, you'll choose your own projects, and that all sounds great, but the reality is that  ambiguity and change are actually really difficult to handle on a day to day basis. And if you're joining a start up and that start up is actually doing really well and growing really quickly, it means no day is going to be the same as the last.

Nothing, most things are not going to go according to plan. There are going to be very difficult days and weeks and very and days that are full of excitement. And mostly it's a rollercoaster and the thing is not everyone likes rollercoasters. And so I think it's about if you're joining a startup, especially if it's the first time embracing the change, embracing the chaos, but also recognizing that it's not for everyone.

And that's okay. Yeah, perfect. Well, it's a good spot to wrap it up there. But Rona, thanks so much for joining us. Thanks for your honesty and sharing your experience. Appreciate it. Hope you enjoyed it. My pleasure. Thanks so much for having me.